Working to promote mental health and mental wellbeing through disseminationof knowledge, training partnerships and consultation

WELCOME

Welcome to The Clifford Beers World Wide Web site. I hope that your visit here will encourage you to learn more about our endeavours and those of colleagues working in the field of mental health promotion and wellbeing.

Established in 1996 as the original UK charity devoted solely to the promotion of mental health, we have been able to develop a range of initiatives throughout the world. It is very rewarding to see how our efforts have also encouraged others to follow and join us in this enterprise: for example, the International Journal of Mental Health Promotion was the first such publication in this field and our annual conferences have developed over the past years 20 years to become a series of World Conferences that attract delegates from the 5 continents. The 9th World Conference will take place in USA in the autumn of this year. Earlier this year the initial Clifford Beers Initiative centre was commissioned at the University of South Carolina in the USA.

Our sole aim is to improve the mental health and wellbeing of people across the globe and consequently success depends on forging effective links with other like-minded people and organisations.

To this end may I invite you to make contact if we can be of help and of course we welcome your comments, suggestions and advice.

Michael MurrayChief Executive

Why Clifford Beers?

This name was chosen in recognition of the life and work of Clifford Whittingham Beers (1876-1943), the American humanitarian who devoted much of his life to the study and advancement of the mental hygiene movement.

Clifford Beers was born in New Haven, Connecticut and educated at Yale University. In 1900, after suffering a mental breakdown he was confined to an asylum for three years. After his recovery he wrote the harrowing, classic autobiography, 'A Mind that Found Itself' (1908), a book that aroused a storm of protest and public concern about care of people with mental illness. In the eyes of many the modern mental movement can be traced to this publication.

In 1908 Beers founded the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, in 1909 the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (in 1950 it was recognised as the National Association for Mental Health in the USA) and in 1931 the International Foundation for Mental Health Hygiene. Not content with enhancing the mental health movement in North America, Clifford Beers was instrumental in developments in a number of the European countries, expending both this own time and finance in assisting national mental health organisations to become firmly established.

In a period of history when communications were extremely restricted the efforts and perhaps more importantly the success of Clifford Beers are difficult to fully appreciate; we can perhaps just try to build upon the foundations he established.